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“Sam stays up-to-date in the search industry which is constantly changing, and I've always found her work effective and thorough. With Sam you can be sure that what she advises will be not only industry best practice, but for the client's long term benefit.”
Robin Houghton, Director,
Robin Houghton Communications
How do I determine the best keywords to optimise my website for?
I’m sure you’ve often been told by people, I typed ‘wool sweaters’ into a search and couldn’t find your website. So you tear your hair out worrying about your site’s rankings for all possible combinations of keywords that someone just might type into a search to find your website.
Well it’s just not possible to optimise your site for every possible keyword combination, it would take ages and is unlikely to be effective.
So how do you determine the most effective keywords to optimise your website for? Well, bearing in mind that it is impossible to accommodate everyone and their quirky search keyword combinations, you want to choose keywords that are actively searched on and highly targeted to the products and services featured on your website. However, you don’t want to choose keywords that are so competitive that you’ve got almost no chance of ever getting high up the rankings.
Here’s an example, type ‘second hand cars’ into Google. It returns over 36,000,000 web pages. But type ‘second hand Volvo cars’ into Google and you’re returned with just over 2,000,000 web pages. The more targeted your keywords, the better the chance of gaining a higher ranking as there will be less competition.
No doubt you want to know how to choose your keywords. Well, you can try a few methods. There are free keyword research tools at DigitalPoint, which gives Yahoo! Search Marketing (Overture) & Wordtracker results. Or you can use Wordtracker’s free version or Yahoo! Search Marketing’s free versions separately. Paid keyword research tools include Wordtracker & Keyword Discovery. These tools should be used as a guide rather than exact search numbers.
Another good way of researching keywords is to run a pay per click campaign with Google Adwords, who incidentally also has a good free keyword research tool. You could start with a low budget campaign just to see which keywords are being searched on the most. Remember to use phrase and exact matches as broad matches trigger ads on variations of your keywords.
Finding the best keywords to optimise your website for is not an exact science and over time you will need to re-research them to ensure you’re still targeting the best ones.
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